All simplistic hypothesis about “what drives terrorists” falter when there is suddenly in front of you human faces and complex life stories. The tragedy of contemporary policies designed to handle or rather crush movements who employ terrorist tactics, are prone to embrace a singular explanation of the terrorist motivation, disregarding the fact that people can be in the very same movement for various reasons.
The post The different faces of Taliban jihad in Pakistan appeared first on OUPblog.
The news seems to have gone quiet about Sangin district in Helmand. Before Christmas there was an intense media storm that the district was about to fall to the ‘Taliban’. There were reports of the SAS being deployed, and the day after, the story of multiple Taliban commanders being killed in a night raid. As I have written before, it is impossible to separate every one with guns in Helmand into two groups: the ‘government’ and the ‘Taliban’, so it is difficult to see who the SAS were targeting, and who they were supporting.
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The recently-acknowledged death of Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar has prompted a raft of commentary on what this means for the movement, particularly in relation to its ability and willingness to continue engaging in peace talks. But how much can we reasonably know about how the Taliban will move forward, particularly when so much hinges on how the leadership transition unfolds?
The post Mullah Omar’s death and the Haqqani factor appeared first on OUPblog.
If the author being the youngest Nobel Peace Prize nominee—and winner—isn’t impetus enough to warrant seeing what this memoir is about, nothing arguably is. Famous for advocating for education for all—male and female, all around the world—and for surviving a roadside assassination attempt by the Taliban, who were unimpressed with her efforts, Malala Yousafzai is […]
CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen visited the Carnegie Council in New York City late last year to discuss Talibanistan, a collection he recently edited for Oxford University Press. Bergen, who produced the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997, discussed the positive changes in Afghanistan over the past ten years: “Afghans have a sense that what is happening now is better than a lot of things they’ve lived through…”
Bergen was joined at the event by Anand Gopal, who wrote the first chapter in Talibanistan. Gopal recounts the story of Hajji Burget Khan, a leader in Kandahar who encouraged his fellow Afghans to support the Americans after the fall of the Taliban. But after US forces received bad intelligence, perceiving Hajji Burget Khan as a threat, he was killed in May 2002, which had a disastrous effect in the area, leading many to join the insurgency.
Peter Bergen on Afghanistan:
Click here to view the embedded video.
Anand Gopal on the tragic mistake made by the American military:
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Peter Bergen is the director of the National Securities Studies Program at the New America Foundation, and is National Security Analyst at CNN. He is the author of Manhunt, The Longest War and The Osama Bin Laden I Know. Anand Gopal is a fellow at the New America Foundation and a journalist who has reported for the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, and other outlets on Afghanistan. Talibanistan: Negotiating the Borders Between Terror, Politics, and Religion was edited by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann and includes contributions from Anand Gopal.
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The post Have conditions improved in Afghanistan since 2001? appeared first on OUPblog.
President Obama is expected to announce at his State of the Union address tonight that 34,000 US troops — half the number currently stationed there — will return from Afghanistan next year. The war in Afghanistan has now continued for over ten years, since US forces entered the country after September 11th. The country, however, is still far from stable, and as Alex Strick van Linschoten, co-author of An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, explains, US involvement has become a crutch for a country still trying to find order. “It is a reality that the only thing holding the country together at the moment is essentially the presence of the foreigners, yet at the same time it’s one of the reasons for the continuing instabilities,” Strick van Linschoten says.
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Alex Strick van Linschoten has lived in Afghanistan since 2006. With Felix Kuehn, he is the co-author of An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, co-editor of My Life with the Taliban, and The Poetry of the Taliban. He is currently working on a PhD at the War Studies Department of King’s College London. Follow him on Twitter @alexstrick.
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The post Will Obama address Afghanistan in his State of the Union address tonight? appeared first on OUPblog.
A NY Times Documentary on Malala Yousafzai who was shot by the Taliban for her views on education, human rights, life and living. She is still in hospital.
A 60 Minutes report last night accused author Greg Mortenson (pictured, via) of fabricating parts of his bestselling memoirs and misusing funds from his charity, the Central Asia Institute (CAI).
The report examined three particular issues: (1) Did Mortenson first visit the village of Korphe after a mountain climbing trip as he wrote in his memoir, Three Cups of Tea? (2) Was Mortenson captured by the Taliban as he alleged in his follow-up Stones into Schools? (3) Is the CAI carrying out its charitable mission with the money it collects from philanthropists and donors? According to several sources who were interviewed, the answer is “no” to all three questions.
Former CAI donor Jon Krakauer called Mortenson’s first meeting with Korphe villages “a beautiful story” and “a lie.” Mansur Khan Mahsud denied that the Taliban kidnapped the author. Mahsud appears in a photograph from the alleged kidnapping, but works as the research director of a respected Islamabad think tank.
continued…
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
By Ervin Staub
A few hours after the 9/11 attacks, speaking on our local public radio station in Western Massachusetts, struggling with my tears and my voice, I said that this horrible attack can help us understand people’s suffering around the world, and be a tool for us to unite with others to create a better world. Others also said similar things. But that is not how events progressed.
Our response to that attack led to three wars we are still fighting, including the war on terror. How we fight these wars and what we do to bring them to an end will shape our sense of ourselves as a moral people, our connections to the rest of the world, our wealth and power as a nation, and our physical security. What can we do to reduce hostility toward us, strengthen our alliances, and regain our moral leadership in the world?
One of the basic principles of human conduct is reciprocity. As one party strikes out at another, the other, if it can, usually responds with force. Often the response is more than what is required for self-defense. It is punitive, taking revenge, teaching the other a lesson. But the first party takes this as aggression, and responds with more violence. Israelis and Palestinians for many years engaged in mutual and often escalating retaliation, sometimes reciprocating immediately, sometimes, the Palestinians especially, the weaker party, waiting for the right opportunity.
Many young Muslims, and even non-Muslims converting to Islam, have been “radicalized” by our drone attacks, and our forces killing civilians in the course of fighting. The would-be Times Square bomber has talked to people about his distress and anger about such violence against Muslims. While we kill some who plan to attack us, especially as we harm innocent others, more turn against us.
Of course, we must protect ourselves. But positive actions are also reciprocated—not always, but often, especially if the intention for the action is perceived as positive. Non-violent reactions and practices must be part of effective self-defense. Respect is one of them. Many Muslims were killed in the 9/11 attacks, and we should have specifically included them in our public mourning. Many Arab and Muslim countries reached out to us afterwards, even Iran, and we should have responded more than we did to their sympathy and support. Effective reaching out is more challenging now, and after the mid-term elections the world might see reaching out by President Obama as acting out of weakness. But the U.S. is still the great power, and both the administration and members of Congress ought to reach out to the Muslim world.
But even as we show respect and work on good connections, we ought to stop supporting repressive Muslim regimes. That has been one of the grievances against us. An important source of Al-Qaeda has been Egyptian terrorists, who fought against a secular repressive Egyptian regime. Then as Al-Qaeda was organized by the Mujahideen, who fought against and defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, they turned from such “near enemies” against the far enemy, the United States, which supported these repressive regimes.
Another important matter is dialogue between parties. Dialogue can be abused, used simply to gain time, or as a show to pacify third parties, or can even be a fraud as in Afghanistan where an “impostor” played the role of a Taliban leader in dialogue with the government . The Bush administration strongly opposed dialogue with terrorists—but then with money and other inducements got Sunnis in Iraq, who have been attacking us, to work with us. In persistent dialogue, in contrast to the very occasional negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the parties can develop relationships, gain trust, and then become ready to resolve practical matters.
To resolve our wars, we cannot simply bomb and shoot. We must also
Okay, while we sympathize with the striking writers in Hollywood, this article made us roll our eyes a little: Strking Writers Turn to Child’s Play.
It’s about television and film writers who’ve suddenly found an “unusual” (!) new calling writing children’s books. Several already have deals with a new imprint of IDW Books, which publishes a number of TV and movie tie-ins, so clearly somebody’s people talked to somebody else’s people, and then they did lunch, baby! Good for them, we say. But if any of those writers ever find themselves seeking out children’s book publishers beyond the thirty-mile zone, we have a few pointers for them, based on many, many years of experience reading the efforts of folks who think that writing children’s books is just like any other kind of writing, except shorter, and for shorter people. Thus:
1.) No snappy dialogue, please. Picture books aren’t “talky,” and they’re becoming increasingly less wordy. Also, kids really don’t say the darnedest things.
2.) We want stories, not pitches. Don’t try to dazzle us with talk about sequels, series, character licensing, animation rights! If you want to rule an empire, go play with action figures. (Which we will not be marketing as a tie-in.)
3.) Children’s books don’t have a laugh track, nor do they come with a remote control for switching channels. So for the love of Cosmo Kramer, don’t try to be HILARIOUS and ATTENTION-GETTING all the time, okay?
4.) Booger jokes are not subversive. Not even when they’re funny.
5.) Carefully read and consider the tone of the following quotes:
a.) “I’m a father of five and often lament the lack of really creative, funny children’s books.” b.) “I’m finding that in good children’s books, the text isn’t just describing the picture but the two are working together to advance the storytelling.” c.) “And, sometimes, there’s also a chance to make a political point.”
Did you get all that? Good. Now you know what not to say in a cover letter.
Anyway, we’ve seen this kind of attitude before, and we sure wish we had a residual check for every time we’ve had to endure it. But it’s nice to know that other folks in the children’s lit world feel the same way we do. And we’ll be glad when the strike’s over. If they could bring back Arrested Development while they’re at it, that would be even better.
We’ve found this time of year we get more manuscript submissions in our slush pile than usual. We think this might be because 1.) plenty of people—especially teachers and school librarians—are on holiday break in late December and have extra time to stamp all those SASEs and 2.) “Write and publish a children’s book” sounds like a fabulous New Year’s resolution, doesn’t it?
We don’t mind the extra mail—and yes, we do read ALL the submissions, every last one. And with all these new aspiring authors, there are bound to be questions. One we hear a lot is: When’s the best time of year to submit a manuscript? It depends on the publisher: some places receive unsolicited submissions for only a few months out of the year (and some don’t at all). But we’re always open to submissions—for us, the slush season is year-round. We read all the time, and when we’ve found enough book projects to fill our next list, we look for books for the list after that!
We publish books twice a year: our Fall list comes out in September, and it’s when we publish books about fall and winter holidays (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Groundhog Day, and so on), while books about spring and summer holidays (Easter, Cinco de Mayo, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc.) are published in March on our Spring list. Plenty of our other titles have seasonal considerations as well—we make sure we publish our books in time for African-American History Month, the start of the school year, or even the apple harvest. Sometimes, it’s all in the timing.
But if you’re a writer wondering when you should send your holiday or seasonal book manuscript—well, “anytime” still applies. (One thing we editors learn early on is to have flexible imaginations. We’ll read stories about Santa Claus even during a heat wave in August.) Keep in mind that it always takes time to consider a submission, and even longer to publish it—this is especially true of picture books: an illustrator will need several months to produce the artwork. So if you sent us a Christmas story last week, it isn’t likely to be published in time for next Christmas. (Alas, your friends and family won’t get your book in their stockings, and you’ll have to give them all Chia Pets again.) And if you have a picture book idea about, say, the winter Olympics, you’ll need to get it into a publisher’s hands ASAP for it to be out in time for 2010—and at some publishers, you’ll be too late already.
What this all means, of course, is that your New Year’s “publish a children’s book” resolution for 2008 will probably take until at least 2009 to accomplish. So what are you waiting for? Read our guidelines!
